🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they live in this area between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny